DARK

The line of lights on the coast, the glimmer of the city, the white spray where the waves broke … It made no difference that it was dark and the rain was lashing against the windows. Whoever was visiting his flat for the first time invariably mentioned the view, as if compelled.

         Luis Reigosa picked a CD from the shelf, put it on the hi-fi and poured the drinks into wide glasses, the rims of which he’d previously rubbed with lemon peel. He couldn’t know they’d be the last he’d ever pour.

         They listened to the roar of the wind as they went into the bedroom with their arms around each other. From the living room, Billie Holliday reached out to them with ‘The man I love’:

Some day he’ll come along

The man I love

And he’ll be big and strong

The man I love

TUNING

‘City police three, Leo nil’

         Leo Caldas put down his uncomfortable headphones, lit up a cigarette and looked out of the window.

         Some children were chasing pigeons in the garden, under the attentive gazes both of their mothers, who were chatting in a circle, and of the birds waiting for them to get close before taking flight.

         He put his headphones back on when a call came in, a woman wanting to lodge a complaint against the pub beneath her house. The noise, she said, sometimes kept her up until dawn. She complained about the shouting, the music, the beeps on the horns, the parallel parking, the drunken singing, the brawls, the walls sprayed with urine, and the broken glass strewn on the pavement – which constituted a hazard for her child.

         Caldas let her get it off her chest, knowing he’d be unable to offer anything but comforting words. That kind of thing was not within the competence of his department, but of the city police.

         ‘I’ll send a memo to the city police asking them to gauge the decibels and to make sure closing times are being observed,’ he said, writing the address of the pub in his notebook.

         He wrote underneath: ‘City police four, Leo nil.’

The theme tune of the show played out until Rebecca placed another sign scribbled with black letters against the glass. Leo Caldas took a quick drag on his cigarette and balanced it on the edge of the ashtray.

         ‘Good afternoon, Angel,’ Santiago Losada, the presenter, greeted the listener who was waiting on the other end of the line.

         ‘Let us welcome pain if it is a cause for repentance,’ the man said, enunciating each word clearly.

         ‘Sorry?’ the presenter replied, as surprised as Caldas at the strange statement.

         ‘Let us welcome pain if it is a cause for repentance,’ the man repeated, in the same slow voice as the first time.

         ‘Excuse me, Angel. You’re live on Patrol on the Air,’ Losada reminded him. ‘Do you have any questions for Inspector Caldas?’

         The man hung up on him, leaving the presenter without a reply and cursing under his breath.

         ‘People love to hear themselves on the radio,’ apologised Losada, as the ads came on.

         Leo Caldas smiled and thought that Losada deserved to be cut down to size every now and again.

         ‘Some more than others,’ he muttered.

On another call, an elderly man living on the outskirts of the city complained that, at a set of traffic lights near his house, the green light didn’t stay on long enough for him to walk across the road.

         Leo took down the location of the traffic lights in his notebook. He would let the city police know.

         ‘Five-nil, without counting the crazy guy’s call.’

The inspector’s mobile phone was on mute, but on the table its screen lit up, warning him he had some missed calls.

         He saw there were three, all from his subordinate Estévez, and decided not to respond to them. He was tired and didn’t want to drag out the day more than strictly necessary. They’d meet later at the police station, or, with a little luck, the following morning.

         He took a long drag that finished the cigarette, stubbed it out into the ashtray and popped his headphones back on to listen to Eva, who told him that certain supernatural apparitions, indeed abominable spectres, unfailingly visited her house every night.

         Leo wondered whether Losada should contemplate creating a segment called Madness on the Air to accommodate all the visionaries who phoned in so often. When the presenter underlined the name and number of the woman in his diary, he thought Losada just might.

A few calls later, programme number one hundred and eight of Patrol on the Air came to an end. Leo Caldas read the final score in his black-covered notebook: ‘City police nine, crazies two, Leo nil.’

AMBIGUITY

The inspector walked into the police station and proceeded down a corridor formed by two rows of desks. He had often felt, striding between the lined-up computers, that he was in a newsroom rather than in a police station.

         Estévez stood up when he saw him appear, and went right behind him lugging his six-foot-five bulk.

         Caldas opened the frosted-glass door of his office and took a look at the papers stacked on his table. He prided himself on being able to locate anything among the apparent chaos of jottings and documents, though he knew this to be only a half-truth. He slumped into his black leather chair, exhausted after a long day’s work, and sighed; he barely knew where to begin.

         Rafael Estévez burst in, adding to his worries.

         ‘Inspector, superintendent Soto called. He wants us to go to this address,’ he said, waving a piece of paper. ‘Some officers are already there.’

         ‘Between you and the superintendent I can barely sit down for a minute. Do we know what happened at all?’

         ‘No. I told him you were at the radio station with that Patrol-on-the-Air idiot, and I offered to come over myself, but he wanted me to wait for you.’

         ‘Let me see.’

         Caldas read the address, crumpled the piece of paper and left it on the desk.

         ‘Shit,’ he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair.

         ‘Are we not going, chief?’

         Leo Caldas clicked his tongue.

         ‘Give me a minute, will you?’

         ‘Of course,’ replied Estévez, who was still a bit unfamiliar with his superior’s manners.

Rafael Estévez had only been in Galicia for a few months. A rumour at the station had it that his transfer had been a punishment administered in his native Zaragoza. The officer had accepted his job in the town of Vigo without any visible displeasure, but he was finding it difficult to adjust to some things here. One was the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of the weather; another the steepness of the streets. The third was ambiguity. To Rafael Estévez’s stern Aragonese mind, things were this way or that, got done or didn’t, so it was only with considerable effort that he managed to decipher the ambiguous expressions of his new fellow citizens.

He had first come into contact with the local ways three days after arriving, when Superintendent Soto asked him to take a statement from a teenager who had been caught selling marijuana to his schoolmates.

         ‘Name?’ Estévez had asked, trying to do it as quickly as possible.

         ‘My name?’ asked the boy.

         ‘Yes, lad, I wouldn’t be asking for mine, would I?’

         ‘You wouldn’t,’ the young dealer conceded.

         ‘So tell me your name.’

         ‘Francisco.’

         Officer Estévez typed the boy’s name.

         ‘Francisco. And then?’

         ‘And then what?’

         ‘Haven’t you got a surname?’

         ‘Oh, Martín Fabeiro, Francisco Martín Fabeiro.’

         Rafael Estévez, sitting in front of his computer, entered the surname and moved the cursor to the next blank on the statement form.

         ‘Address.’

         ‘My address?’

         Rafael Estévez looked up. ‘Do you think I’d be asking for mine? You don’t think this is a game of charades, do you?’

         ‘No, sir.’

         ‘Well then, tell me your address.’

         Estévez paused, waiting for the boy’s answer, but the question seemed to have thrown him into deep thought.

         ‘Would that be where I normally live?’ he said eventually.

         ‘Do you actually sell the pot or smoke it? Of course that would be where you normally live. We need to be able to contact you.’

         ‘The thing is, it depends.’

         ‘How do you mean, it depends? You must have a house like everyone else. Unless you live in the streets, like a cat.’

         ‘No, no sir. I live with my parents.’

         ‘Tell me your address, then,’ roared Estévez.

         ‘My parents’ address?’

         ‘Look, matey, let’s be clear: I’m the one who asks the questions here. Do you understand?’

         ‘Yes, sir.’

         ‘Well, now you understand, you’re going to tell me where the fuck you and your family live, do you get me?’ he warned him, visibly annoyed.

         The boy gazed at him, apparently without comprehending why this enormous police officer was getting so worked up.

         ‘I said, do you get me?’ pressed Estévez.

         ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy mumbled.

         ‘Well, let’s get this over with. I haven’t got all morning. Now, where the fuck do you live? And please tell me the address where you normally live, not that of the brothel where you father drops by on pay day’

         After another pause, the boy dared to say:

         ‘Do you want the address in town or in the village?’

         ‘Now …’ said Estévez, struggling to control himself.

         ‘You see,’ the boy hastened to add, ‘we’re here in the city from Monday to Friday, but at weekends we load the car and go to our village. I can give you either address.’

         The boy finished the explanation and awaited new instructions. Estévez looked at him without even blinking.

         ‘Sir?’

         The officer pushed the computer aside and lifted the boy half a metre clean off the floor by the lapels. He then grabbed his regulation gun and pointed it at the horrified kid’s mouth.

         ‘Do you see this gun? Do you see it, you pathetic clown?’

         The boy, his feet hanging in the air and the barrel barely a centimetre from his mouth, nodded in alarm.

         ‘If you don’t fucking tell me where you live I’ll knock out all your teeth with it and shove them one by one up your arse. Is that clear?’

         The superintendent, who was observing from behind a dark glass how the newcomer deported himself during interrogations, walked in at that moment and stopped him carrying out his threat. However, he couldn’t prevent the episode from triggering all sorts of conjectures about Estévez’s fiery personality at the station, or gossip from spreading on the subject of why he had been transferred to Vigo.

         To keep the impetuous officer under close surveillance, Soto had entrusted him to inspector Leo Caldas. And yet Estévez, in spite of the inspector’s calm influence, had remained in a constant state of alert. There was something inside him that brushed against the Galician people’s inability to call a spade a spade. He saw this attitude as bordering on a compulsion, and refused to believe it might be a mere local trait.

Leo Caldas read the address on the piece of paper again: Duplex 17/18, North Wing, Toralla Towers.

         ‘Let’s go over before it gets dark,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’re going to enjoy the ride.’

MINSTREL

Rafael Estévez got in the car whistling a tune he’d had in his head for several weeks. Leo Caldas sat back in his seat, rolled down the window a crack and closed his eyes.

         ‘I’ve got to go down to the beach, right, inspector?’ the officer asked. His knowledge of the complex local geography was improving, but he still didn’t feel entirely at ease amongst the dense traffic of the city.

         Caldas opened his eyes to show him the way.

         ‘Yes, it’s the island opposite Canido harbour, which is the first one right after the beaches. You can’t miss it.’

         ‘Oh, the island with the high-rise. I know where that is.’

         ‘Let’s go then,’ replied the inspector, closing his eyes again.

         Along the boulevard on the coast, they passed a modern fishing harbour on their right, which had been reclaimed from the sea by filling a narrow cove. Several boats were returning to their moorings with hundreds of seagulls hovering above them in search of a sardine for dinner.

         On the left, on the side facing the waterfront, they left behind the old Berbés Harbour, where all the seafaring activities of the city had started at the end of the nineteenth century. Its granite arcades, under which the fish had been unloaded in former times, had retreated from the coast as a consequence of the constant expansion of the docks.

         The tide was low, and the strong smell of the sea wafted in through the window. Rafael Estévez liked this smell; it was almost new to him. He looked at the landscape, the intricate relief of fjord-like inlets known as rías that had seduced him from the moment he’d seen it. The sea he’d known before, in the summer holidays of his childhood, was the Mediterranean, which extended as far as the eye could see. In Galicia, however, swaths of green land gave way here and there to rías of varying colours, shielded from the pounding of the Atlantic by streamlined, white-sand islands.

         Following the boulevard, they went past the shipyards where the armatures of future boats were in view, and then drove into the ring road – a misnomer, since it wasn’t a ring at all – until they reached the area of the first beaches. After several rainy days, crowds of people had returned to Samil beach on this mild afternoon, and along its stone promenade joggers, dogs and bicycles went past each other once again. Over the sea, the sky had taken on a reddish colour that heralded the nightfall.

         At the local sports centre, two teams of children were having a football match. . They shouted to each other as they chased the ball, and their airborne voices came in through the barely opened window. The car went round the fence of the site and lunged into a sharp bend in the road, near the mouth of the Lagares River. With the speed, Caldas was jostled over to the driver’s seat. He opened his eyes, readjusted himself, and watched the children for a few moments. At the next bend, as the orange team were nearing the blue team’s goal area, the inspector lost sight of them. Then the centrifugal force threw him against the door of the car.

         ‘For God’s sake, Rafael!’

         ‘What’s up, inspector?’

         ‘Why can’t you drive like a normal person?’

         Rafael slowed down. A few seconds later they heard the high-pitched ring of Caldas’s mobile.

         ‘That’s yours, boss,’ said Estévez, when he considered it had rung enough times.

         Caldas read the superintendent’s name on the screen and answered.

         ‘Leo, did you get the message?’ Superintendent Soto seemed as impatient as ever.

         ‘We’re on our way,’ he confirmed.

         ‘Is Estévez with you?’

         ‘Yes,’ ratified Caldas. ‘Shouldn’t he have come?’

         ‘He shouldn’t have been born,’ replied Soto and rang off.

The car went on along the winding road that skirted the coast. After leaving several built-up areas behind, it reached Vao Beach. The island came into view right across from it.

         Toralla was a small island. There were only a few mansions, beaches and tracts of wilderness in barely twenty hectares opposite the most exclusive residential area of the bay. But something unusual stood out in this small paradise, a twenty-floor high-rise that, at the height of urban brutalism, had been built with no regard for the harmony that the island had preserved until then. Caldas had always thought that, if it had been constructed five centuries before, it would have been enough to scare Francis Drake away and send him and his buccaneers back to England.

         They left the main road and headed for the access bridge. Estévez stopped the car where it jutted out.

         ‘Do we have to drive across, inspector?’

         ‘Unless you’d rather swim,’ replied Caldas without opening his eyes.

         Rafael Estévez, muttering to himself, drove along the two hundred metres of the bridge. To the west, the golden light shimmered on the sea, making it difficult to look at it face on. But to the east one could clearly see the shore, lit by a sun that was almost level with the water.

         They left behind the metal staircases descending onto the beach, which was the larger of the two in Toralla. The rocks of the breakwaters, now exposed by the low tide, were covered in a green coat of moss.

         A barrier and a sentry box controlled access to the island.

         ‘Isn’t this open to the public, inspector?’

         ‘Only so far,’ replied Caldas.

         A security guard came out of the booth with a notepad in his hand, and asked them where they were going. As soon as Estévez showed his badge, he lifted the barrier and let them through.

         The car cleared the surveillance post and proceeded along a narrow road, passing on one side a long row of cottages and on the other a forest of pine trees, whose smell blended perfectly with the smell of the surrounding sea. Where the road forked, they took the right. They skirted the woods until an enormous high-rise appeared before them, making Estévez whistle in admiration.

         ‘Some skyscraper, inspector. It didn’t look so high from far off.’

         ‘I hope its foundations are good,’ muttered Leo Caldas, who had the conviction that no place was better for setting one’s foot than firm ground.

         Since most of the flats in that marvel of bad taste were occupied only during the summer, the parking lot was nearly empty. Caldas identified the van of the inspection unit amongst the few parked cars. It must be quite serious if they were still there. On getting out of the car, Estévez took a closer look at the tower. He had to tilt his head back to see it whole. He whistled again and followed his boss to the lobby of the building.

         There were twenty floors and three wings: north, south and east. Leo Caldas reckoned there must be about ten flats per floor, six hundred of them in total. It must have been too good a real estate deal to deny it planning permission, even if the result was an eyesore.

         He reread his piece of paper: ‘Duplex 17/18, north wing.’

         They followed a sign and entered the lift. Caldas pressed 17. Once out, the inspector went briskly up a short flight of stairs. Estévez followed suit, his footsteps resounding down the hall.

         The door was marked out by a police tape blocking the way. Leo Caldas peeled it off from one side and opened the door. Estévez went in behind his boss, not before fixing the crime scene tape back on.

         They came into a large room, the front wall of which was taken up by an enormous curtainless window. The iridescent light of the sunset flooded it with reddish colours. It commanded a superb view, this window: the Cíes islands right in front; one of the shores of the main ría on the left; and, on the right, the Morrazo Peninsula, which jutted out into the sea like a stone gargoyle. Rafael Estévez immediately approached the window the better to appreciate that vista. Caldas did not.

         The living room had two sofas and a glass coffee table. In front of the sofas was a state-of-the-art hi-fi instead of a TV. Caldas realised the several small metal boxes scattered about the corners of the room were loudspeakers. A bookshelf packed with CDs took up the back wall.

         Adorned with a basket of dry flowers on its centre, and surrounded by four high-backed chairs, the dining table was as far as possible from the window. Across from the shelves hung two engravings. One represented a vase painted with love scenes, the other the frieze of a classical edifice. Beside them, hanging on the same wall, there were six saxophones.

         Clara Barcia, one of the forensic officers, was in the living room, dusting a couple of glasses for fingerprints.

         ‘Hi, Clara,’ Caldas said, as he approached.

         ‘Good afternoon, inspector,’ she replied, straightening up her back. ‘I’m nearly done with the prints.’

         ‘Don’t get up, please,’ said Caldas, matching his words with a gesture, and taking a look around. ‘What have we got here?’

         ‘Murder, inspector. Pretty nasty.’

         Caldas nodded, then said:

         ‘And how’s your work going?’

         ‘I’ve collected quite a few samples,’ she said, pointing to some small evidence bags she’d lined up against the wall, ‘but you never know.’

         ‘Are you on your own?’

         ‘No, initially all four of us came down, but for a while it’s been only Doctor Barrio and me. He’s downstairs in the bedroom. Over here.’

         Clara Barcia put the glass she was examining on the table, stood up and showed them the way down the spiral staircase.

         ‘Are you not coming down, officer?’ she asked Estévez through the wooden steps of the staircase.

         Caldas turned round and saw his subordinate at the living room window taking in the view. He was surprised to find that this implacable officer, who was capable of softening up the toughest thugs, was showing as much appreciation of the landscape as a minstrel would.

         Estévez took three agile leaps down the stairs and placed himself behind the inspector. Barcia gave a pair of latex gloves to each of them.

         ‘Where’s the corpse?’ asked Caldas.

         ‘In here, on the bed,’ Barcia replied, opening the door to the only bedroom in the flat.

         Rafael Estévez, struggling to ease his huge hands into the gloves, opened his mouth for the first time since he’d come in.

         ‘Fucking hell!’

FIND

The man’s horror-stricken face was a clear indication of the pain he had gone through. His hands were tied with a piece of white cloth to the headboard of the bed, and his naked body was contorted into an unnatural posture. A sheet covered him from the waist down to his feet.

         Leo Caldas frowned in a reflex action, shutting his nostrils to keep away the foetid waft of decaying flesh. His face relaxed a moment later, as he realised the corpse was too recent to give off the smell of death.

         Guzmán Barrio, the forensic doctor examining the corpse, turned round when he heard them walk into the room.

         ‘I had to start without you, Leo,’ he said, looking at a watch one could barely make out through his glove.

         ‘I’m sorry, Guzmán. They’ve kept me at the station until the last possible moment. Do you know Rafael Estévez?’ asked Caldas, turning towards his subordinate.

         ‘We’ve seen each other at the station,’ the doctor confirmed.

         ‘How’s the examination going?’ asked Estévez.

         ‘Oh, it’s going.’

         ‘I see,’ said Estévez. Then he added to himself. ‘Why is everyone always so precise round here?’

         Leo Caldas approached the bed and inspected the dead man’s hands, tightly tied to the headboard. They were big but delicate, and due to the lack of blood they’d taken on a bluish shade that contrasted with his pale arms. From the deep marks round his wrists it could be deduced that he had struggled to free himself until pretty much his last breath.

         ‘Do we know who he is?’ he asked.

         It was Clara Barcia who answered.

         ‘Luis Reigosa, thirty-four years old. A native of Bueu. He was a professional musician, a saxophonist. Concerts, lessons, and so on … He lived alone, and had been renting this flat for a couple of years.’

         Caldas experienced a familiar unease as he heard the concise biographical details about the man.

Until he joined the police force, the only dead body Leo Caldas had seen from up close was that of his mother lying in her coffin. He hadn’t even asked to see her, but had agreed to it when someone mentioned it was the last chance to say goodbye. Suddenly he was lifted off the ground, and he found himself in someone’s arms, as if levitating, peering over that dark wooden box in which the inert body of his mother lay wrapped in a shroud. In a state of confusion, he had looked at a face seemingly covered with a strange coat of wax, and in those brief seconds that he remembered as lasting an eternity, a few of his tears had splattered on the glass sealing the coffin. His mother’s sunken eyes were closed, and her pale lips were barely distinguishable from the rest of her face, a colour that was in sharp contrast to the lipstick she had applied even until her last days.

         For years that indelible waxen image had visited his dreams. And he had often remembered his father at the wake, sitting in a corner, his face transfigured with pain yet without shedding one tear.

         At the police academy some time later, when he was still a recruit, he’d often been warned he was bound to find himself faced with a violent death. Caldas had felt scared and expectant of that future personal encounter, as well as uncertain of what his reaction might be.

         He had soon found out, on one of his first nights on duty, when he and his partner were called to a park where a homeless man had been stabbed to death. Not without surprise, he discovered that seeing the unknown man’s body didn’t shock him at all. He didn’t even hesitate to go near it. And from that first time, dead bodies were to Leo Caldas little more than lost property. When he was at a crime scene he effortlessly detached himself from the fact that the remains had once breathed life, whether a body was still warm or in a state of decay. He concentrated on gathering the evidence that might help solve the causes of death, on collecting the disparate pieces of the puzzle that he must put together.

And yet, as soon as he learned the identities of the deceased he felt an inner shudder; for once he knew their names or, however sketchily, certain aspects of their lives, it was as if the actual human beings arrived on the scene of the criminal investigation.

‘Did you say he lived alone?’ asked Caldas, who could tell by the state of the body that he hadn’t been dead for long.

         Officer Barcia nodded.

         ‘Who informed us of the death?’ he asked, surprised that the corpse had been found so quickly.

         ‘It was the security guard on the bridge,’ replied Clara Barcia, ‘though the body was actually found by the cleaner. She comes in twice a week. Apparently the poor woman turned up at the sentry box in a state of shock after seeing the body. She had to be sedated, so we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to speak to her. Constable Ferro wrote it all down. He must be at the station writing up the report.’

         Caldas nodded. He was sorry to be late, even more so since the reason was Patrol on the Air.

         ‘When do you reckon he was killed?’ asked the inspector.

         ‘Last night,’ replied Barrio. ‘From the body temperature I’d say between seven and twelve last night. But I’m afraid I can’t be more specific until we do the post-mortem.’

         ‘If you don’t need me here, I’ll go back to work,’ said Clara.

         She left the room and disappeared up the spiral staircase. Leo remained still in front of the dead man. He couldn’t stop looking at his open eyes. They were of a very light blue and seemed to be staring at him in horror.

         ‘Do we know how he died?’ asked Rafael Estévez, turning to the doctor.

         ‘Reigosa?’

         ‘No, Lady Di,’ said, Rafael cutting him short.

         ‘Don’t mind him, Guzmán, Rafael is always this polite,’ Leo Caldas put in. ‘In any case, do we know the cause of death?’

         ‘Not the exact cause, but I can assure you this had a lot to do with it,’ he replied, removing the sheet that so far covered the dead man’s abdomen, ‘even if I can’t be more precise for now.’

         ‘Holy fuck, what’s that he’s got there?’ exclaimed Estévez, cupping his testicles and moving away from the body.

         ‘That’s what I was trying to find out when you arrived,’ the doctor said. ‘I still don’t know for sure.’

         The body displayed a huge area of bruised skin. The damage started in his stomach and extended down to his legs. On one of them, the unsettling blackness reached down to the knee. In all that area the skin was so shrivelled up that Caldas had the impression that he had a tanned hide rather before him than human skin. He’d never seen anything like it. Judging from Doctor Barrio’s astonished expression, he hadn’t either.

         ‘I’m sorry, doctor, did you say the stiff was called Reigosa?’ asked Estévez, approaching once again to take a closer look.

         ‘Apparently so,’ the doctor conceded.

         ‘And where’s the guy’s dick, if you don’t mind me asking?’

         Barrio placed his tissue forceps on a small protuberance at the centre of the grotesque haematoma.

         ‘What do you think the blackest bit is?’

         Estévez pored over the area that the doctor indicated.

         ‘That?’

         The doctor nodded, and Estévez looked at his superior in disbelief.

         ‘Did you see that, inspector – this guy would need a doctor’s forceps even to go and take a leak.’

         Leo Caldas came closer the better to inspect the body. The kinds of bruises he had come across until then gave the impression of tumescence. But if that was a tumescent sex, he didn’t want to imagine the regular size of Reigosa’s penis. It looked like the empty shell of a barnacle: dark and wrinkled. And one could just make out, as black as all the rest, the saxophonist’s testicles. They were the size of raisins, and had the same texture. He turned towards the doctor, as if asking for further information.

         ‘I’m going crazy trying to guess how anyone managed to damage the tissue so badly, but I can’t figure it out. I’ve thought of fire or any other heat source, but then there’s no burning on the skin. See?’ said the doctor as he moved Reigosa’s minute member this way and that. ‘It’s all leathery, in a very strange way. I haven’t found any wounds or blood … I’m beginning to think they poured some kind of abrasive substance on him.’

         ‘The pain must have been excruciating,’ said Caldas, visualising the scene Guzmán Barrio had just presented. ‘And no one heard anything? Even if only a few people live here at this time of year, someone must have heard the screams.’

         Barrio pointed at a piece of tape and a wet white ball placed on the night table beside the bed.

         ‘When we found him, he was gagged with that. They rammed the cotton nearly all the way down his throat, and then sealed his lips with the tape. There’s no way anyone would hear you with that in your mouth.’

         They fell silent as they looked at the dead saxophonist.

         ‘It must have been harrowing. Have you seen his eyes?’ said Doctor Barrio breaking the silence, as if he were trying to know whether the inspector was as stunned as he.

         Leo Caldas nodded and looked again at those eyes that had moved him from the first moment. Seen close-to they made an even greater impact on him. They revealed the pain to which Reigosa had been subjected with such cruelty – a mute torment, as he hadn’t even been able to scream. He remembered reading words by Camus to the effect that the human being is born, dies and is not happy. He couldn’t know, but he guessed the existence of this man, lying here livid and lifeless, had been like that.

         ‘I’d never seen eyes like that. Don’t they look unreal?’ asked Caldas as he pointed at Reigosa’s face.

         ‘They do,’ replied Barrios. ‘At first I actually thought they were contacts. But they aren’t. His eyes really were that colour, water-blue.’

Reigosa’s room was large, clean, filled with the same reddish light as the rest of the flat. On the wall over the bed hung a framed poster, a reproduction of Hopper’s Hotel Room. Caldas remembered the original painting. He’d seen it with Alba at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. He’d been dazzled by the loneliness of the woman sitting on the bed, by her serene beauty and sad mien. In front of the poster, Caldas once again had the impression that the painter, in portraying her in that pink nightdress, with her suitcase half packed, had profaned her intimacy. And he wondered whether they, as Hopper in his own way, were not violating Reigosa’s.

         The wall opposite the bed was also one big window. It wasn’t as big as the one in the living room, but it commanded similar views. Caldas didn’t go near it.

         On the night table there were two books, one on top of each other. The top one, which had a bookmark inserted among its six hundred-odd pages, was Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Caldas picked it up with a gloved hand and read the name of its author on the back cover: ‘Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Stuttgart, 1770-Berlin, 1831)’.

         Estévez approached from behind.

         ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History,’ he read. ‘You must suffer from insomnia if you can read this kind of stuff in bed without falling asleep. Don’t you think, inspector?’

         ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what he had it for,’ answered Caldas tersely.

         The inspector glanced again at the body, still tied to the bed with his horribly bruised genitals exposed. It was an undignified death for a musician with an interest in philosophy. He put the thick volume on the night table and picked up the other one: The Terracotta Dog, by Andrea Camilleri.

         Nor were these two the only books in the room. On the wall opposite the door there were several packed bookshelves. Caldas remembered his father, who always said you can know a man from what he reads and what he drinks. He was surprised to find almost exclusively crime novels on the musician’s shelves: Montalbán, Ellroy, Chandler, Hammett …

         ‘The order of last night’s events seems clear,’ Guzmán Barrio was thinking out loud, as he carried on examining Reigosa’s inert body. ‘A few drinks in the living room, then they came down to the bedroom, had sex and, when this guy was at his most trusting, his lover tied him up, gagged him and murdered him. I wonder why they didn’t do it in a simpler way. This,’ he said, gesturing towards Reigosa’s gruesome stomach, ‘whatever it was they did, must have been a lot more difficult, more dramatic.’

         ‘You can’t really mean he had a shag with that?’ put in Estévez, pointing with his hand to the dead man’s minute penis.

         ‘Rafael, do me a favour, will you, go and see what you can find in the living room,’ asked Caldas, pointing him in the direction of the door.

         But once Estévez disappeared up the stairs, Caldas turned towards the doctor and asked: ‘Guzmán, do you actually think he had intercourse?’ He knew this would open the most important line of inquiry.

         The doctor shook his head in an ambiguous manner, making a movement that didn’t quite mean yes or no.

         ‘I cannot be sure, but on a first examination it seems possible. At least I don’t think we should rule it out, in spite of what the member looks like now. In any case, I need to carry out a complete post-mortem before I can confirm anything. Why don’t you drop by tomorrow? Today we can’t reject any possibility,’ he concluded.

         As yet Guzmán Barrio hadn’t found any signs of violence, besides the obvious ones in the genital area and the wrists. The doctor ascribed only the former to the murderer. Like Caldas, he believed the chafing round the wrists had been produced by Reigosa in a desperate attempt to free himself.

         Guzmán Barrios believed that what they had there was a crime of passion: all the clues pointed that way. There wasn’t any disturbance in the room, as is often the case following a fight, and this lent weight to the theory that the dead man had not been forcibly tied up. The inspector thought Reigosa knew the murderer, or at least that the murderer had not aroused any suspicions in him. It seemed logical to assume that he wouldn’t have let himself be tied up if he had sensed any danger.

         ‘Will you have anything by morning?’ asked Caldas impatiently.

         ‘Can you make it noon?’

         The inspector moved closer to the night table and looked at the photograph on it. He prized apart the wooden frame and took the picture out. Reigosa was smiling and fondly holding his saxophone, as if they were a couple of teenage lovers. It was a black and white picture, and the dead musician’s nearly transparent blue eyes came out in a very light grey.

         ‘Guzmán, I’m taking this with me,’ he said, slipping the picture into the inside pocket of his jacket.

         Before leaving the downstairs floor, Leo went to take a look at the bathroom. It was all done up in white marble, with expensive-looking taps and a large hydrotherapy bath. The towels, white too, were clean and neatly piled. Thinking it was no small luxury for a jazz-club musician, he left for the living room. If there were any hairs on the floor, a trace of urine in the toilet or any other clue that might help them identify the killer, it would not go unnoticed by the methodical work of Forensics.

         On the top floor, Estévez was looking out of the window. Clara Barcia had moved on to the carpet in her systematic search for clues. She had turned all the lights on and divided the room into squares marked off with pieces of string. The evidence found in each of them was put into plastic bags and labelled accordingly.

         Caldas noticed the glasses on the coffee table. The drinks bore out the theory that Luis Reigosa had been with someone he knew, or at least with someone who hadn’t taken him by surprise. He bent down to sniff one of the glasses, and clearly recognised the dry, penetrating smell of gin. He checked the rim to see if there were any lip marks and immediately made out some faint traces of lipstick.

         ‘Have you checked for prints on the bottles?’ he asked the forensics officer.

         ‘They are all in the kitchen, inspector,’ she replied, nodding.

         Leo Caldas looked around for the kitchen without success.

         ‘It’s here,’ said Clara Barcia as she stood up. She opened a sliding door that Caldas had believed to be a cupboard, and a tiny kitchen appeared. ‘They’re called compact kitchens. They’re all right if you don’t cook much, as they take up little space, clearly.’

         Caldas moved toward it, but Clara Barcia stopped him.

         ‘I’m sorry, inspector. There’s quite a few prints in there I haven’t had time to check yet.’

         ‘Of course,’ he said, moving away to allow Clara to close the door. He knew how meticulous she was when it came to inspecting hot spots at a crime scene, so he didn’t mind his curiosity being checked by an officer of lower rank. On the contrary, he was glad he could count on Clara Barcia’s expertise for this investigation. He valued her powers of observation and her infinite patience in hunting the tiniest pieces of evidence.

         The inspector drew near the saxophones hanging on the wall. The oldest one was the one Reigosa was holding in the picture he now had in his pocket. Caldas stroked its cold metal hump with the back of his hand, as if offering it his condolences.

         In the living room, hundreds of CDs, almost all of jazz, were stacked up on five shelves. The top shelf featured female vocalists, while the three others housed an admirable collection entirely devoted to the saxophone. Among many unknown names, the inspector recognised some he was quite familiar with, such as Sonny Rollins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker. On the bottom shelf were dozens of scores. Leo Caldas picked one at random, which turned out to be Stella by Starlight for tenor sax, by Victor Young. He knew the piece, and had it at home in a version by Stan Getz.

         Although he couldn’t read music, he flicked through the score, poring over the symbols curling on the lines of the stave, and hummed the melody to himself. He remembered with a touch of nostalgia the Sunday afternoons which Alba had christened ‘of music and letters’, during which some of these very musicians had kept them company as Alba and he, dressed only in their pyjamas, read lying down in the sofa.

         ‘Have you seen the CDs, chief?’ asked Estévez, still standing in front of the window.

         Caldas nodded.

         ‘Our friend of the tiny fried penis must have been a bit queer, don’t you think?’

         ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

         ‘Don’t get me wrong, chief. I’m not bothered who people choose to sleep with. This is a free country.’

         ‘No need to make excuses,’ said the inspector, encouraging him to go on.

         ‘But you only need to take a look at all those funny CDs, the paintings right there or the one over the bed to guess this guy was a friend of Dorothy’s.’

         ‘Just because of that it doesn’t mean …’

         ‘Just because of that?’ repeated Estévez. ‘What did you expect, chief, a poster with a young lad in the buff?’

         The inspector realised his subordinate had not seen the lipstick traces on the glasses, but he chose to keep silent rather than contradict him, as he saw officer Barcia casting wary glances at Estévez.

         ‘Drop it, Rafael,’ he muttered, sensing that if he let Estévez take this line of reasoning any further, there’d be even more talk about him at the station.

         Clara Barcia finished scrutinising one of the squares marked on the carpet and moved on to the next, the nearest one to the hi-fi. When she bent down, she flicked a switch without meaning to, and a warm woman’s voice suddenly filled every corner of the room.

Day in, day out

That same old voodoo follows me about.

The young officer looked in vain for the switch to stop the music.

         ‘Sorry, so sorry,’ she said, blushing a little for her clumsiness.

         ‘You can leave it on, it’s fine by me,’ replied Caldas, reassuring her that it didn’t matter at all.

         ‘What is this?’ growled Estévez.

         ‘Billie Holliday,’ said the inspector as he walked over to the hi-fi and turned up the volume. Clara smiled and kneeled back down within her square of carpet marked off with pieces of string.

That same old pounding in my heart,

Whenever I think of you.

And baby I think of you.

Day in and day out.

         Estévez went back to the window and looked at the landscape that had allowed him to forget the dead man’s genitals for a moment.

         ‘Do you know what I like best about this high-rise, inspector?’

         ‘That you can’t see the high-rise from here?’ replied Caldas, without coming close to the window.

         Estévez remained silent, and Billie Holliday moaned once again.

When there it is, day in, day out.

THE BAR

Caldas was walking down the pavement of Príncipe Street, which bore hardly any trace of its earlier hustle and bustle. The shops were now closed, and there was barely anyone about. Most people had abandoned this part of town and, taking advantage of the wonderful May evening, had chosen the boulevard by the sea for their evening stroll.

         The inspector was on his way back from the city police station, in the town City Hall, where he had presented the officer on duty with a file containing the catalogue of complaints, addresses and telephone numbers which he had collected at the radio station. He had asked Estévez not to wait for him. He preferred to walk home. He liked the city at night, when he could hear his footsteps rhythmically resounding on the pavement, and when the smell of trees prevailed over the exhaust smoke of cars. Besides, the empty streets were ideal for going over the inspection at the high-rise on Toralla Island. From the moment he’d left Reigosa’s place he’d had the niggling feeling – which tailed him like a blinking light – that he had missed something. Unable to put his finger on it for now, he followed the bend to the right in Príncipe Street, only ten or twelve steps after its start. He reached a square closed off by a one-storey stone house.

         The stone façade had a Galician emigrant drawn on it, one of the many whom poverty had forced into exile, like the ones portrayed by the artist Daniel Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao in his illustrations. Beneath it, there were words once uttered by Castelao himself: ‘I’ll be back when Galicia is free’. He had died in Buenos Aires.

         The door and the two windows were made of wood and painted green. A few cast-iron letters, which had been screwed into the stone, formed a word in a childish handwriting: ‘Eligio’.

         Leo Caldas pushed the door open.

Since Eligio had taken charge of the bar several decades before, its rustic walls had given shelter to the intellectual cream of the town. The staff of the Pueblo Gallego newspaper, which was to be found only a few metres away, had led the way, attracted by the excellent house wines. And, little by little, lawyers, literati, poets, painters and politicians had come to place themselves near the cast-iron stove of the establishment.

         Sitting in a corner, Lugrís had drawn medusas, seahorses and ships which seemed sunk in the marble table. And a few of his colleagues, long on talent but short on funds, had left their legacy painted on the walls, thus linking them forever with Galician twentieth-century art. Some painters had done this as a sign of friendship; others as payment for the mugs – there were no glasses here – that they had drunk on credit.

         Near the oak casks stacked on the uneven floor, conversations had taken place between Alvaro Cunqueiro, Castroviejo, Blanco Amor and other eminent men. Their table talk was an oasis of distinction in the industrial greyness which back then was expanding to the four corners of the town.

         The writer Borobó, in one of his chronicles, had dreamed up a fable about the end of the halcyon days. Apparently the Lord, who of course knew that salmon had become extinct in Galician rivers, had invited Don Alvaro to dine at a higher table. Unable to resist a freebie, the usual crowd had come along with the great writer. And to lubricate the banquet they had requested wine from on high. The story goes that Eligio, with so many friends at the party, had no other option than to go and pour it himself. The details after that are not clear, and Eligio certainly never came back to tell his version, but it is said he didn’t go up in the best of moods.

         In any case, with Eligio in heaven, the bar passed to his son-in-law, Carlos, without any trouble and without losing any of the former owner’s spirit or the enlightened atmosphere it had acquired in Eligio’s lifetime. True, the wine no longer cured you of the flu, but the culprits were the winemakers of the area rather than the soul of the place. The mugs were still white china, and the benches the same strong wood as always. A series of small riveted plaques memorialised the eminent regulars.

It had gone twelve when the inspector checked his mobile. He realised it had been some time since he had received a call that made him rush out into the night. Then he asked for another jug of wine.

COWERING

On the thirteenth of May it felt like summer. The bright morning light came in through a window, filling the room at the police station. Rafael Estévez was sitting on a chair and going through a sheaf of papers. A woman, in silence, looked at him from across the table.

         ‘María de Castro Raposo, a resident of Canido, Vigo, widowed, sixty-four years old.’

         ‘A youthful sixty-four,’ she qualified.

         ‘Is that more or less than sixty-four?’ asked Estévez.

         Inspector Caldas, who was standing nearby, checking the contents of a folder, put in:

         ‘Please, Rafael, let’s focus on the statement.’

         The huge officer obeyed with a heavy sigh.

         ‘María, yesterday, 12 May, you declared that you arrived at Reigosa’s flat like any other day, at around three in the afternoon, and that you let yourself in with your own key. According to the statement, Reigosa gave you the key about two years ago, when you started working for him.

         The officer paused, seeking the woman’s agreement. She made a signal with her head that he interpreted as a nod.

         ‘You went up to the top floor, which is the one you normally clean first,’ Estévez went on reading, ‘is that right?’

         ‘It depends, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.’

         ‘OK,’ said Estévez, sternly staring at the woman, ‘but do you usually clean the top floor first?’

         ‘Often enough I do.’

         Estévez was beginning to get impatient.

         ‘Let’s get this clear, ma’am. Did you clean the top floor first the day you found Reigosa dead?’

         ‘I already told you I did, officer. You don’t have to shout for me to understand,’ she added, lifting a hand to her ear.

         ‘Am I shouting?’ Estévez sought the inspector’s gaze.

         Caldas kindly asked him to lower his voice. He really was surprised at how easily Estévez lost his temper, with barely any incitement.

         ‘Let’s try and make some progress here,’ said Estévez going back to his papers. ‘It was half an hour after entering the flat, when you opened the door to the bedroom in order to clean it, that you found the late Mr Reigosa gagged and tied to the headboard of his bed. At that moment you left the house to go and call for help.’

         The officer made another pause to look at the woman and obtain confirmation of what he’d just said.

         ‘Is that so?’ he asked.

         María de Castro seemed more interested in the floor, where her gaze was fixed, than in the policeman’s question.

         ‘Is that so?’ asked again Estévez, more loudly.

         The woman stared at him in silence.

         ‘Was that how it was?’ repeated Estévez, prepared not to budge until he’d had an answer.

         ‘More or less,’ replied María de Castro.

         ‘How do you mean “more or less”? Did it or did it not happen the way I’m saying?’ insisted Estévez, more and more impatient.

         ‘It might have been roughly the way you describe it,’ said María de Castro at last.

         ‘How might it have been roughly that way? This is your actual statement.’ Estévez went back to the first paragraph, pointed at it and said: ‘This is you, right, “María de Castro Raposo, resident of Canido, Vigo, widowed …”?’

         ‘Officer,’ Caldas called him to order.

          ‘Inspector, I’m only trying to get the lady to tell me if it was the way it says here. For fuck’s sake, it’s not a trick question.’

         ‘It was pretty much as it says there, yes,’ said María.

         ‘Well, say it then. That’s all I’m asking you.’

         The woman shrugged.

         ‘So you can also confirm you left the flat in search of the caretaker and, not finding him, went to the sentry box at the entrance of the island to warn the security guard who controls the bridge access,’ proceeded Estévez, putting down the papers on the table once he finished. ‘Is that right?’

         A slight nod was all he got in the way of an answer, but he took it as a yes, and asked:

         ‘María, did you see anything odd in the flat?’

         ‘Odd?’

         ‘Yes, odd, out of the ordinary,’ repeated Estévez, irritated. ‘Beside the fact that Reigosa was dead, of course. Did you see anything unusual, weird, strange, curious, anything at all that caught your attention? Anything along those lines?’

         ‘Well I don’t know,’ she hesitated. ‘I mean, something that may have caught my attention … no, I don’t think so.’

         Rafael turned to his superior, who was still on his feet, his back resting against the furthermost wall from the table.

         ‘Inspector, when this lady tells me “I don’t think so”, does she actually mean “no”?’

         ‘Yes indeed,’ she replied.

         Estévez turned back towards the woman, who held his gaze a few seconds and then scornfully looked away to the window.

         ‘You’d better carry on yourself, chief,’ said Estévez, standing up.

         The inspector nodded and took a few steps in the room, holding up the folder in one hand and his second cigarette of the day in the other. The woman seemed to take no notice of him, so he approached the window, thus shielding her from the morning light.

         ‘María, what I have here is a lophoscopic report,’ he said in a calm voice, showing her the folder.

         ‘A what?’

         ‘The fingerprints report. That’s a technique that allows us to identify the fingerprints that we find at a certain place.’

         The frown on her face indicated that the explanation had not been enough. But she said:

         ‘I see.’

         ‘Do you remember that we took your fingerprints yesterday?’

         ‘I remember a bit,’ answered the woman.

         ‘Since fingerprints are unique to every person, once we obtain them we can establish in all confidence who’s been at a certain place and identify which things they’ve touched.’

         ‘And?’ María de Castro seemed positive that the conversation had little to do with her.

         ‘Yours appeared all over the flat,’ Caldas informed her.

         ‘Mine?’ She seemed surprised.

         ‘Your very own fingerprints, María, they’ve appeared at the flat of the late Mr Reigosa’s,’ clarified the inspector, wriggling his own fingers.

         ‘Well, I work there,’ she said, ‘I guess that’s why …’

Caldas chose to ignore the reply and pressed on:

‘The thing is, the glasses were covered with your fingerprints too, María,’ he said softly.

‘The glasses?’

‘Do you know which ones I mean?’ asked Inspector Caldas.

‘Well, I know of lots of glasses,’ she replied vaguely.

‘In particular, I mean the ones that were sitting on the coffee table in the living room of Mr Reigosa’s flat,’ Caldas clarified. ‘Do you remember the glasses we are referring to now?’

The woman rubbed her chin.

‘Glasses … I don’t know.’

         ‘The glasses with gin and your fingerprints clearly stamped all over them, María,’ he said, raising his voice slightly. ‘Fingerprints that ruined the rest of the prints we might have found there.’

         María de Castro gave a start.

         ‘Of course, the glasses!’ She finally remembered. ‘I had a drink to steady myself. You know, after the shock of finding Mr Luis in such a horrible state. Did you not hear your partner say that it was me who found the body?’

         ‘María, it’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself involved in a mess like this ever again, but if out of some strange coincidence it should happen, please do not touch anything! If you need to have a tipple, go to a bar, but faced with a dead person, leave everything as it is.’

         ‘I only wanted …’

         Caldas was not going to accept her excuses.

         ‘You messed up the only lead we might have had on the identity of the person who shared the last hours of Reigosa’s life. Do you realise how important that is?’ he asked, again looking at his report, making her withdraw into her chair, seeking the support of its back.

During the inspection of Reigosa’s flat a good number of fingerprints had been found, but the lophoscopic report confirmed that nearly all of them were either the dead man’s or María de Castro Raposo’s.

         The only different one was a print on the bottom of one of the glasses left on the living-room coffee table. Unfortunately, Raposo’s hands had damaged it considerably, and although the police had managed to salvage a fragment of the print, it wasn’t quite enough to feed it into the police computerised archive for a match. Computers didn’t work with fragments. They behaved just as Estévez did: they wanted all or nothing, and there were no such things as half measures for them.

         If a suspect emerged they would have to manually compare his or her fingerprints with the small part they had salvaged from the glass – provided they obtained a court order to take them in the first place.

         What seemed most surprising to Inspector Caldas was that no prints had been found in the bedroom, which seemed to confirm that the killer had taken the trouble of covering up his traces before leaving the flat. He was rather impressed that someone should have stayed to clean up while Reigosa, no doubt still alive, lay gagged on his bed with his hands tied to the headboard. It must have taken quite a lot of guts not to feel intimidated by the dying man’s tormented blue eyes.

‘Are you going to accuse me of having a small drink, inspector?’ asked María de Castro, learning she had spoiled a piece of evidence.

         Caldas shook his head and left the report on the table.

         ‘Can I go, then?’ she asked, visibly relieved.

         The woman grabbed her bag, which was near the table on the floor, and put it on the table, awaiting the inspector’s instructions. Now she knew she wasn’t going to be punished, she tried to restore her challenged moral integrity: ‘Besides, I only drank what was left in one of the glasses.’

         ‘Tell her we found her prints on both of them,’ Estévez said to his boss.

         ‘Well, maybe I did drink from both. I can’t remember everything, I’m sixty-four years old.’

         ‘That’s OK,’ said Caldas, bringing the matter to a close and inviting her to leave.

         Rafael Estévez, on the other hand, was unable to remain silent, as his DNA did not include his superior’s Galician patience:

         ‘We’ve also found your prints all over the gin bottle and all the rest of the liquor bottles in the kitchen.’

         ‘I’m a cleaning lady. My job is to pick up things and clean them,’ replied María de Castro, offended. ‘Have you tried cleaning anything without touching it, officer?’

         The enormous police officer approached the table at which the woman was still sitting.

         ‘Listen, lady, I won’t have you making fun of me,’ he warned her, pointed his index at her.

         Caldas dragged him aside and asked the terrified woman to leave. He had to help her up, as she was so frightened she was almost cowering under the table.

         As soon as she was up she obeyed the inspector. She left the room in a hurry without taking her eyes off Estévez at any time.

         ‘Are you out of your mind?’ said Caldas, once she was out the door. ‘Do you want us both to get a bollocking?’

         ‘But if I didn’t stop that old bag in her tracks, she would’ve tried to convince us that she was a teetotaller,’ Estévez justified himself.

         ‘It doesn’t matter, Rafael. You can have a go at her all you want, that won’t get the fingerprints back. Can’t you be practical for a change? We only needed her to confirm what she’d said on her statement.’

         ‘And what do you think, chief, has she confirmed it?’

         ‘In a way,’ said Caldas.

         ‘In a way, has she or hasn’t she?’

         ‘In a way, Rafael,’ replied Caldas tersely. Some people need to learn how to listen.

         The inspector put out his cigarette, picked up the report and made off for his office, leaving Estévez alone in the room. On the way over his mobile rang. Doctor Guzmán Barrio’s initial results were in.

Text © Heirs of Domingo Villar

Translation © Martin Schifino

This title is available to read in English – see the page “Novels”.